"Not for the first time with Harouni, I found the smoothness and control of her hour on that theme almost too neat. A proponent of gentle parenting, she practises gentle and measured comedy too. The jokes are very deftly sprung as we're led through her experience of raising an uncommonly large baby boy, with detours via her relationships with her husband, dad and mom."
"One fine wisecrack skewers her sports-fan father's opposition to they/them pronouns. There's another on how unqualified new mothers are for childcare, and a choice gag about the similarities between the new arrival in her family and a colonialist Brit. If Harouni's observations on new parenthood are fairly commonplace, idiosyncrasy is supplied by a visit her folks make from her native Brooklyn, to help with childcare."
"(Grand)mother and daughter wind one another up partly because Janine worries she can't measure up to her own mother's parenting. Harouni's account of these concerns arrives at just the point in a show when standups like to give us their heart-on-sleeve moment, along with the credulity-stretching claim that Harouni had never seen her mother as a person, rather than a parent, until now."
Janine Harouni's new show centers on parenting an 18-month-old son with help from her visiting Lebanese- and Irish-American parents. The performance combines gentle, measured comedy with deftly sprung jokes about pronouns, novice motherhood, and a gag comparing her child to a colonialist Brit. Extended-family dynamics provide idiosyncratic material as the comedian navigates anxiety about living up to her mother's parenting and discovering her mother as a person. A candid, delinquent anecdote about pretending to have cancer on a date offsets the show's carefully engineered control, while the closing moments aim for a heartfelt reconciliation between mother and daughter.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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